


SAIL

by theclockiscomplete



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-19
Updated: 2014-11-19
Packaged: 2018-02-26 05:36:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2640050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclockiscomplete/pseuds/theclockiscomplete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor has had enough, but the TARDIS isn't going to give up on him that easily, and calls in the only one in the universes who could help him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	SAIL

**Author's Note:**

> I was a bit slow to hear AWOLnation's "Sail" (as in, last summer), and when I did I immediately got the mental image of Eleven thinking the lyrics to himself as he stood contemplating the edge of the pool. This is obviously dark-- I wrote it to satisfy the music video in my head, which would end around three quarters into the fic.

The Doctor avoided his reflection in the still blue water of the TARDIS pool, looking past it instead to gauge its depths. Twelve feet? Twenty? Where was this pool located in time and space, anyway? He didn’t remember putting it in. 

The TARDIS groaned around him. He ignored her. The ghost in the water demanded his attention. 

Reluctantly, his eyes refocused on the gaunt face staring back at him. There was nothing to see but the eyes. Eyes that had seen so much—far too much and were now seeing themselves for the last time. 

The TARDIS groaned again. The mouth of the face in the water twitched upward on one side, ever so slightly. “You can’t stop me, old girl,” he said. “A great many times you have helped me…but I’m afraid I’m beyond help now.” His voice echoed around the room. 

He wanted to keep talking, found that it drowned out the voices in his head, but had nothing else to say. The stranger in the water watched impassively. 

He heard Amy (raggedy man, goodbye) and Rory (you make people dangerous to themselves), calling out above the maelstrom of accusative faces and voices ricocheting in his thoughts and memories. He hadn’t slept in weeks. Not since the death of the Ponds. 

He’d tried comforting himself with the knowledge that they still had each other, but it just didn’t work. Who did he have? Nobody. What he deserved. He’d given what he liked to think was sensible thought to his decision. If a Time Lord wanted badly enough to die, he could stop his regeneration cycle, as the Master had as he’d shuddered quiet in his arms those years ago. 

He’d never given the inhabitants of Gallifrey a choice. He imagined they burned through every regeneration, flooding the planet with futile yellow light. It made no sense, because Amy and Rory and Martha and Donna and Adric and Sarah Jane were all there, burning in his mind…he shook his head and refocused on the water. 

He became aware of the TARDIS making a noise he’d not previously heard before. “Are you crying?” he asked aloud. The noise didn’t stop. “Well,” he said quietly, staring down. “I guess I just have to add you to the list of those I have caused pain. But don’t worry,” he added. “You’ll be the last. We’ll watch over the Ponds forever, old girl.” He straightened his bow tie and patted his jacket down, removing his sonic and laying it beside him. He took a deep breath, cast one final glance up at the sky, and jumped. 

His first thought was that he should have tested the temperature first—it was quite cold. His second thought was that it didn’t matter. His third was a fear that he would simply float back to the surface, unable to accomplish this final task. Then water began weighing his clothes down with a vengeance and he relaxed. 

His head started to hurt and his ears felt full. His chest was tight. Faces flickered around him like mirages. He’d thought this way of dying would have been more peaceful, but the pressures present all around him were intensely uncomfortable and he hadn’t wanted to see all of the faces around him yet again. 

He closed his eyes. He felt the TARDIS groan around him, making a sound he’d heard only once ever before. His eyes flew open. She didn’t. His body gave way and his mouth opened, seeking air. Water rushed in and he seized once in a full-body attempt at a gag reflex, then his sight dimmed and he relaxed, drifting down, down…

River was two-thirds through with page seventy-two of her Melody Malone book when a searing pain ripped through her head; a single note of anguish with no identifiable origin or cause. She grasped her temples between both hands and tried to make sense of the raw emotion pouring through her. It was the TARDIS, this she knew. But why…? The Doctor. He had to be in trouble. 

She scrambled for her vortex manipulator and paused, not knowing what coordinates to put in it. She nearly screamed herself in sheer frustration. You have to help me! She cried over the noise in her head, and pushed the button.

She materialized beside a tombstone in a cemetery on a cloudy afternoon. The TARDIS stood behind it. Even the wood looked as though it was in anguish. Smoke was pouring out and she was making a ghastly “bonging” noise that River had never heard before. 

Her mind raced to catch up with what she saw. The TARDIS was beside Amy and Rory’s grave, and it was in anguish. It was also dusty. And something was draining the power. She flung the doors open and charged inside. 

“Sweetie?” Everything was absolutely still in the console room, more still than she had ever witnessed. And also dusty. It was wrong. A fundamental force pulled her down one of the halls and she followed without hesitation, her dread rising every second and clawing at her throat.

“Doctor!” she plowed through one of the doors and stumbled to a halt at the edge of the pool. “What is it?” she called, looking up at the TARDIS roof. “Show me!” Her eyes fell on the sonic beside the pool. She knelt and picked it up, cradling it gently. “Doctor?” She glanced down into the water. Raw panic froze her for a full second, and then she hit the water headfirst with all the force she could muster. 

He had drifted; she was slicing through the water, and thus she caught up to him just before he hit the bottom of the pool. His ridiculous fringe of hair waved gently around him and his eyes were closed, arms out in a cruel parody of a hug. River grabbed him around his chest and used the bottom as a springboard, giving them a couple feet head start towards the surface. 

He hung limp in her arms; adrenaline was all that allowed her to pull his body along with her. The pool ladder was just ahead; River made a desperate lunge for it and grasped one of the rungs. She used the leverage to pull them both up until she was able to lay her husband on the edge. 

She lay a palm on one cold cheek and brushed his sopping hair away from his face. “Doctor?” she whispered. The TARDIS had stopped her unusual noise and seemed to be holding her breath. River leaned forward and kissed him. 

He was completely unresponsive, his lips cold and clammy and still. Everything opposite of the man she loved. She remembered those same lips crushing hers what only seemed like nights ago but, she was startled to realize, had been over a year before. She’d been that long without seeing him? Where had he been? Tears rushed to the corners of her eyes and began to drip onto the Time Lord’s face. 

She brought her hands up, then down onto his ribcage. She heard it slosh after the thump and her stomach turned at the noise. She hit him again, with increasing panic as her tears gave way to wrenching sobs. She called his name over and over, the name that nobody in the universe but her and her husband knew, but he still did not respond. She compressed each heart over and over, pausing to shove her own air into his lungs. 

After what felt like hours of rib-crushing attempts at restoring life, she collapsed sobbing on top of him, her head on his chest. Her lungs ached and she was lightheaded and exhausted from trying to save him. 

“You bloody idiot,” she sobbed. “You can’t die, not like this. We still have so much to do.” She clutched the wet fabric of his shirt on one fist and reached the other hand up to his cheek. “You promised me Derillium,” she said brokenly. “You can’t just bloody leave me. You can’t.” She pulled his body closer and huddled against it, unsure if she would ever be whole again. 

A moment later, she jumped as everything seemed to happen at once. By the time her mind registered that the slosh she had just heard was not caused by any jostle, a veritable fountain of water was gushing from The Doctor’s mouth, which was coughing and sputtering and doing its best to rid his lungs of the stuff. His limbs flailed weakly as he gasped and choked his way to life. 

 

River gasped and cradled the top half of his body in her lap. 

It took upwards of two minutes before those beautiful green eyes opened, and another few seconds for them to find her face. She tried her best to smile. “Hello, sweetie,” she said. 

He coughed again and managed a weak “River.”

She shushed him gently and moved the soaked fringe of hair out of his eyes as his breathing echoed around the room. “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re safe.”

“Time lock,” the Doctor rasped. “The TARDIS time locked herself.” River’s blood turned to ice. If the TARDIS had time locked herself, that meant the Doctor had been suspended in a constant state of near death for…her link with the TARDIS told her it had been a year. 

“Oh, Sweetie,” she breathed. She leaned forward and kissed him again. “It’s over,” she said against him. “It’s over. It’s alright.” He made a weak attempt at returning her kiss. “What happened, Sweetie? Did you fall and hit that wonderful head of yours?”

He shook his head miserably, and River saw something in his eyes she’d never seen before. She kicked herself for never noticing before this moment. His green eyes were dark with grief and aged beyond belief. “Not an accident,” he whispered, and she knew it before the words dropped like coins on the air. Her expression flickered from shock to pain to anger and back to pain.

“It’s Mum and Dad, isn’t it?” He couldn’t meet her gaze. 

“And so many more. So many lives, River. And I couldn’t help them in the end, when it mattered.”

“Gods above.” River’s voice cracked. “So you thought removing yourself from the Universe was the answer?”

A pang of sorrow gripped the Doctor’s chest as a tear joined the drops of pool water on his wife’s face and trailed down to her chin. He reached up a shaky hand and wiped it away. “I’m sorry, River,” he said.

“I can’t believe you.” There was no condemnation in her voice, and somehow that was worse. He expected her to get upset. Angry. Slap him. But he’d broken her heart in a way that went past that. He tried to sit up, but River’s arm across his chest tightened. “Stay down,” she ordered. “We’re going to get you dried off and warmed up.” He nodded meekly, exhausted. His head fell back into the crook of his wife’s arm. She lifted him, alarmed at how light he was even when he was soaked to the skin, and carried him out of the pool room. 

The TARDIS had helpfully moved his door closer, so she needed only to take a few steps to get inside. He’d fallen asleep or lost consciousness, and she worked him gently out of his heavy, cold clothes before laying him out on the bed and pulling the thick blanket up to his bony shoulder. She took a moment to dry her hair and change into warm clothes before bringing over an old, long shirt and pulling it over his head. For a long minute she just stood and stared at her sleeping husband, noting the shadows in the hollow of his cheek and throat and how thin the forearm was that extended from under the blanket. He almost looked peaceful, lips parted slightly and hair drying in strands. She kissed his eyebrow and stretched out behind him, covering them both and pulling him close. It would be a long time, she resolved, before she left him again.

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah. A little fudging of the TARDIS' capabilities, and a little disregard for context. I was mainly in it for the angst. I hope you enjoyed.


End file.
